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ETF Midweek Peek

The market is pivoting and pausing.

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

By David Gillie

NEW YORK ( ETF Digest) -- Tuesday's selloff got no help from the media with a Greek salvation story or any economic data to spin. All eyes are focused on the weekly and monthly payroll reports on Thursday and Friday. Expectations on the monthly report have been lowered 20% from the previous month so a "beat expectations" is almost a certain headline to help the market. Downward revisions of the previous month rarely get mentioned. AAPL continues to dominate the market.

A big down day like Tuesday can give us excellent insight into the market's weakest hands wiping out a week's worth of melt up.

Top performers this week

Ever volatile silver tops the table this week by virtue of its highly favored leveraged inverse. As with many commodities that reach nosebleed highs, gold became speculative and was quickly dumped on the rising Dollar.

Precious metals were largely responsible for pulling down the basic materials sector, but copper has struggled though most of February as well.

The small caps of the Russell 2000 had already began their rollover before the selloff. A bear raid on them was inevitable. Although the energy mega bear hit the top performance table this week, oil broke through the $104/bbl resistance and has now retreated slightly to retest support. GAZ is the lone survivor of the major natural gas ETFs still holding onto a gain.

New Highsn/a

The fact that there are no news highs shows us that individual issues have moved in tandem with the overall market in the melt up. The extremely low volume we've seen over the past weeks is indicative of a market being traded by the major index ETFs.

New Lows

With all the fanfare we saw on the pop in natural gas, there has been an eerie silence as it has fallen to new lows.

Unusual Volume

On a market pivot, volume is an interesting tell. Here we see selling volume in the small-caps and Europe. While simultaneously, buying volume on the VIX and gold inverse. This tells us traders aren't holding out much hope for small-caps and have aggressively bailed out of these positions. Volume has been increasing the volatility positions for a few weeks as market conviction has grown weaker. Choppiness ahead should be expected.

There are two ETFs on this table that stand out of particular interest, IDX and HYG. Indonesia has been very strong on elevated commodity prices and this recent drop put it on the lower trend support. Should it hold this support, it could be strong going forward.

HYG is perhaps the weaker hand in corporate bonds. Yield seekers have chased corporate bonds to extreme levels of overbought. Yield hungry investors are not going away. A dip in corporate bond ETFs could be an excellent buying opportunity.